Welcome to Sober Sunrise, a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience, strength, and hope from around the world. We bring you several new speakers weekly, so be sure to subscribe. We hope to always remain an ad-free podcast, so if you'd like to help us remain self-supporting, please visit our website at sober-sunrise.com. Whether you join us in the morning or at night, there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. I would now like to introduce Scott G from Laguna Niguel.

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Hi, I'm Scott G. Scott Gimble from the podium. I'm originally from Chicago by way of Laguna Niguel, California, and I'm a recovered alcoholic on top of all that. Since I complied with the AA tradition of showing up in a suit and tie, I'm going to kind of just do this right here and let it all hang out.

I'm really humbled and grateful to be speaking here tonight, and thank you for asking me, Bob. It's just an honor and a pleasure, and it's about the top of my list on things that I want to be doing. Alcoholics Anonymous means everything to me. It saved my life, and the opportunity to share the message that I've learned just puts me on a real sober high. I'll share a little bit about that with you.

I'm originally from Chicago. I was sharing with one of the young men over there earlier that I'm from Rush Street, Chicago, as well. I grew up there in the red light district, and I got here in December of 1985. I was on a geographical from Chicago to California because I thought you guys had clean living out here and I could get away from the other substances. I'll stick to alcoholism because I didn't know that you had that same kind of thing out here. I wouldn't have ordered all that stuff from back there then. Thank God for FedEx. But when I always go to new groups, the old-timers they look like newcomers and the newcomers they look like old-timers. So I don't know who to buddy up with. I'm always chasing the newcomer down. I want to see the newcomer and get their name and see if I can carry the message.

Like I said, I got sober in December 1985 on a geographical. My father introduced me to Alcoholics Anonymous when I was 11 years old as he was a recovered alcoholic. So I kind of grew up with the program. I had 10 years of hard drinking by the age of 21, and I was definitely done. I wanted sobriety very much. My way didn't work, and at that young age I'd already been moving out of the house when I was 13, 14 years old, and sold stereos for a living, aluminum siding, and all kinds of stuff that I could incorporate into my drinking life.

When I got sober, I heard messages that if I was to go to a lot of meetings—90 meetings in 90 days—or in my case it ended up to be about 3,000 or so meetings—I was going to be a success. About year four or five of my sobriety I wasn't feeling that. I suffer from alcoholism, and although the alcohol wasn't in my body anymore, I had gotten rid of that part of the problem. The ism was still there. I didn't want to understand what that was because I thought that having a lot of time under my belt was going to work.

As things progressively rolled along, I wasn't putting the booze in the belly anymore, but I wanted to get more out of life than a bunch of AA meetings. I went out in the world and grew a small business into a big business and got away from the problems of not having any money. Money, property, and prestige diverted me from my primary purpose, but I didn't know what my primary purpose was.

About year six or seven, I was a very well-to-do guy and I had everything that money could buy. But I didn't treat the ism in the alcoholism part. I started to get a little bit full of myself. All along I didn't really pay attention to the steps. I didn't pay attention to the basic text, the 164 pages. I thought those were for people that needed to learn more about how to stay sober. I already knew how to stay sober. I just didn't know how to stay un-crazy. I was still sick with untreated alcoholism.

In not treating my alcoholism, eventually we do the thing that we're most apt to do, which is what I did. Alcoholics do one thing well: drink. It didn't happen like that. Problems began to mount up seriously. Business lawsuits started to fly in the door just about on a daily basis. I couldn't believe it.

I had married a gal and that marriage was not a marriage at all. We were barely married a year and I promptly got a higher power in the program—a newcomer. I worked the 13th step and got her as my new higher power. My mistress was my higher power. My business was failing. I had no God in my life. I never worked a step in continuity. I stayed stuck on the fourth step for a hundred years.

I didn't want to drink again. I really didn't want to drink again, and I ended up in a mental institution because I had a classic nervous breakdown. I couldn't handle life without drinking, but I wasn't willing to get myself through the steps to get to God in order to solve the ism. I was in purgatory. I had a lot of time under my belt, but I had untreated alcoholism. Everyone would say, "Ask Scott, go to Scott." I had all the answers, but I didn't know what the question was. The booze was out of my belly, and I was no further along than the first day I was sober.

To make a long story short, I had gotten to the point where I expressed to one person that I really loved and trusted—and we were sober together—that I just wanted to kill myself. I just wanted to. I came to work one day. It was normal. I couldn't handle it anymore. I couldn't hack life. I couldn't deal anymore. I didn't want to drink, and I didn't want to stand up as a newcomer. My pride and ego were just so full that I would rather die than drink again and report back that I'm taking a newcomer chip. So I ended up in a mental institution.

My mistress came over about a week after that and said, "I don't think this relationship is working out too well. Let me have it. I'm in a safe place. You know, if you're going to break up with somebody, what safer place is there than a mental institution?" They've got all the treatment they can get. They're just safe as hell. I can just call the psychiatrist.

After she left, I got out of there and I got home and I was still having nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown of anxiety every day. I couldn't even get out of the house. I remember one morning I was in the bathroom. I wanted to drink so bad. Now that they had put some psychotic drugs into my body, I figured I just had kind of a mini slip. I might as well go all the way.

I just remember rocking myself with my knees to my chest on the floor of this bathroom to get the courage to get up and try to get out of the house. Eventually I drank again. Of course I did. I'm an alcoholic and that's what we do. But I stayed out for 12 years, and as an alcoholic that knows what he is and the type of drinking that I did, it was a heavy 12 years. It wasn't light.

Eventually I got a divorce, so I was kind of free just to do whatever I wanted to do. There weren't too many people that cared about me anymore. Everybody in the program was kind of huddled in their masses of fellowship. They had stopped reaching out to me and I didn't care anyway. I wanted to be drinking. Once I was stuck there, I didn't know how to get back here anyway. I didn't want to get back here. I thought if I came back, I was headed for another 3,000 meetings and that wasn't going to do it. I was scared. I was full of fear. I'm going to go to another meeting and somebody's going to talk about their dead cat or their divorce and I'm not going to—I'm not going to feel like I feel.

Eventually it really started to catch up with me to an implosion level of alcoholism and addiction as well. I had met my wife in 1998. And I remember when we got together, my wife's here with me tonight, my best friend. She said, "My sister's coming over today. You're going to meet my sister. She's very Christian." I'm like, "Oh shit. I'm getting all tight. I'm going to need a drink for that."

She says, "By the way, I think we're drinking too much." I said, "I love this girl and she's going to leave because now she's on to me. Now she's got my number." But despite that, I kept on going. I toned it down the best I could before I'd see her, and you know, try to contain it the best we could. We tried using one of the slogans: fake it till you make it. I don't know what I was doing, just trying. I want the girl. I want the booze. I want the money. I want all this stuff. I can't have it all because I'm an alcoholic.

What occurred is just a massive meltdown in about 2005. We had a beautiful daughter and we were very successful in our businesses. My wife wanted to have another baby. We went out to dinner for this conversation and I said, "I can't do it. I'm an alcoholic and I'm not going to stop drinking right now." The waitress brings over another double vodka to the table. I'm looking at this thing. I can't even pick it up. I'm sick. I've been drinking all day. I'm sick now. Selfish and self-centered and selfish. Isn't that what we are when we're doing our thing, and even when we get a little bit sober because we haven't gotten through these steps yet?

I had been talking to a guy that I grew up with from Dallas, Texas, who today is my sponsor. I drank into another two years until October of 2007 when everything started to hit me hard and I was tearing up everybody around me. I was in the bathroom at work one day and half my body seized up from being loaded on everything. I said, "I'm going to die if I don't do something."

In 2007, I started working with this guy. He had 15 years of sobriety down in Dallas, Texas. My sponsor's name is Tom Pick, and he won't mind me telling you his name from the podium. We had a similar story because Tom had 15 years of sobriety and he went out and drank. He was going to meetings, saying at these meetings, "Guys, I don't know if it's going to be today. I don't know if it's going to be tomorrow. I don't know when it's going to be, but I'm going to drink again and there's nothing going to come between me and that drink."

Then he went out and called me up and says, "You know, I kind of went out. You know, I kind of didn't. Do you think I'm a newcomer?" I'd been drinking all day that day, and I'm like, "You're asking me?" I said, "If you're going to ask me, you're going to answer that question." Tommy called me up about a month after he got out of treatment somewhere in '06, and he couldn't talk right. I said, "Are you sure you're sober?" He says, "Yeah, I've been sober for like 40 days." I said, "Dude, you're slurring your words. You can't speak grammatical sentences. I'm really worried that you did brain damage this time."

A couple months after that we talked again and he was getting better quickly. So the seed was planted of who I could call if I decided I ever wanted this thing again. I'd been working with a leading psychologist, a PhD well known in Southern California about drugs, alcohol, and depression. I'd go to his office every week for a couple years and he'd say, "On one hand we can get sober and life will get better, and on the other hand we can stay crazy." I said, "Well, if that's the question, I'll tell you next week."

I'd leave those sessions and go out and drink. I wasn't ready after all this stuff. Finally, I saw myself going to lose my family, my wife. I could tell she was getting healthier than as sick as I was. She was about ready to take it out the door and throw my ass out the door. But that wasn't the reason I got sober, though.

I knew that in my years of sobriety, there was some semblance of peace and tranquility without alcohol. But I was scared to come back. I tried to come back between '05 and '07 probably three or four different times in mass periods of sobriety that were meaningless. I'm a quitting fool when it came to putting the drink down. I'd just pick it up. I couldn't make the decision.

Page 24 talks about how we lost the power of choice in drinking. I didn't understand the very basic thing in the first step of our book—that I was incapable of making the decision to put alcohol down, that I was incapable of having the choice. The choice left me long before the alcoholism started. I had no choice. I would swear off every day. Every morning I'd be in the shower and swear off. I'd say, "Today I'm not drinking." I'd be drunk by noon or 2 o'clock. Sure as hell I'd come back into the office and everyone would just part ways like the Red Sea because they knew here he is and he's drunk.

I remember one of my employees—we like to play God when we're drinking—and I decided I was going to go back and fire her. She says, "You can't fire me. You're an alcoholic." I said, "I'm still the boss." As crazy as it was.

You know, you could call it high functioning, low functioning. My bottom was deep and low. I'm just amazed that I survived all these years with half a brain intact. When I decided that I was done, done for good and all, they kind of formulated some kind of intervention on me, which would have been the second one in my life.

You know how they all have the letters waiting for you and you're going to enter the room like on TV and they're all going to read to you how they want you to be sober, because you can't scare me into getting sober. You can't scare me into sobriety. It wasn't going to happen. So I let him off the hook because I was done. I was done.

I came back from that psychologist session and he says, "Where you're headed now is back to the office." I said, "Yeah." He says, "There's a group of people waiting for you over there." I said, "Great." So they started in on it. My wife was there, too, and she was in tears. Of course, she's always in tears. You could tell a funny joke and she's going to laugh, and here she is, she's crying right now.

My partner says to me, "You know, I smoke marijuana every day. Why can't you control this?" My best friend says to me, "Hey, you need a 30-day treatment," and I was like, "Guys, I'm done. Let's go. Take me to jail." I needed a medical detox.

When I was there, I talked to my sponsor, who's still my sponsor today, and he says, "You just go along with this deal. You get the medical detox that you need, because I was going to shake. I was going to shake and bake. There were other substances that I was doing, and it was going to be madness." I was ready because I was done.

I got to treatment and my six-year-old daughter—her father had never been away. She was the same little angel. A week before I got into treatment I got down on my hands and knees in front of her bed because she was the closest thing to God and I said, "Please God, help me because I want to be done. I just don't know how. I don't know how to do it."

I tried 3,000 meetings. I'm not knocking meetings. I am not knocking meetings. But my sponsor told me some very important things. He said, "Buddy, we have a spiritual malady that requires a spiritual solution. That's the bottom line. The steps are going to get us to the spiritual solution. They're going to get you spiritually awake. I was putting spirits in my body for all those years. Now I need to replace the power of alcohol with the power of God."

He explained it that way. He didn't use "higher power" with me. We had known each other for many years. I knew there was a God and I knew that I was about as far away from him as I could ever be. If I wanted to have him back in my life, I was going to have to ask him.

I said, "What do I need to do? What do I need to do that I haven't done before?" He says, "Well, I'm glad you asked that. When you get out of that treatment center, you're going to get on a plane. You're going to fly to Dallas, and we're going to go through the steps rapidly, quickly, lightning fast, and we're going to show you how to recover and get recovered."

The book says "recovered" 13 times in this book. I'm a self-proclaimed big book thumper, guys. Without this book I'm a dead man. I got to this place that Tom had taken me to—here we go again, another AA meeting—but this time I walk in the room and I see 250 people, the happiest, healthiest looking guys and gals I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, I didn't think I was in an AA meeting. I thought this was a pit stop. Where are we? These people are really happy.

I'm like, "Are they taking something? Are they on something?" I said to Tom, "This is cool, man. What's up?" He told me, "You know what? God's up. All these people here have had a spiritual awakening. They study the book. We don't talk about our problems in meetings. We don't talk about anything in a meeting except the solution. We go out and we take this work to hospitals. We take this work to institutions. We carry the message to the little sick guy that's still suffering that needs to hear the solution and not what the problem is."

I said, "How long you been sober now, Scott?" He said, "Well, about three weeks." He says, "Alcohol is not your problem. Alcoholism is your problem. Untreated alcoholism is your exact problem. We're going to treat the malady. We're going to treat the spiritual condition, the internal condition that I've carried around since I can ever remember. That restless, irritable, discontent internal condition that my father had before me."

I just come to learn the other day that his father had it before him, and my grandfather, my great-grandfather before him who stuck his head in an oven because he couldn't support the family. I've learned a little bit more about alcoholism since I've been sober. It's a genetic deal. Most of this stuff is genetic. Not far from your family tree, there's some guy up there that was drinking away, treating his ism with alcohol.

I was scared about the God thing. I was terrified because what if he had done his time with me and I ran out of God energy? What if he's going to take the other guy? I was just full of fear. We worked the steps fast. One through nine in three days. Three days. And it was night and day, really. And it was easy.

The first two steps were questions for me. They were easy questions to answer. Am I powerless over alcohol? Hell yeah. Is my life unmanageable? Absolutely. When I put the bottle, when I put the stuff into my gut, I change. I don't drink normal. I don't understand normies. Half a glass and it can be done. That is just insanity to me. Some of you are laughing. It's insanity to you, too. You're going to finish that glass and you're going to finish somebody else's glass. I know it. I did it a thousand times. You ain't going to finish that drink. What are you doing?

I came to believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. Tom explained that it's not the insanity that happens after you put the drink in your body, the behavior that I did. It's the insanity, the definite obsession that I couldn't get rid of, the over and over obsession. Nobody obsesses about alcohol except the real alcoholic.

The book talks about the moderate drinker. He can get alcohol, you know, he can put it down. Wife says quit drinking or no nookie and he's putting that drink down. He's cool. Then the hard drinker who gets maybe some problems headed at him—DUI and stuff—and he drinks hard but he can put it down. He can stop given sufficient reason. He can stop drinking.

Then there's the real alcoholic. That guy was me. It doesn't matter what the reason is. I can't have a reason because it's not going to work out. I can't make the decision. I can't decide today I'm not going to drink because that doesn't work out. It doesn't matter if my wife's going to leave me or my child is headed to grow up in another alcoholic household. That's not going to work out.

The real alcoholic, which I am, has one solution: the spiritual malady and the spiritual solution to the malady. We went through these steps and it was easy. It was easy. I didn't have a lot of stuff that I was unburdened with. I wanted to get it all done. Steps 10, 11, and 12 are staying sober and taking the personal inventory every day.

I sit on the edge of the bed or when my wife is kind of fading out, I'll pick up my mental handbook and go, "Okay, who'd you harm today? How angry did you get? Who do you owe amends to?" My primary purpose is, like the fifth tradition, to carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Without that in my life today, I'm done. I can't stay sober, not for a minute. If my intention isn't to find the alcoholic who wants help, I'm not doing the work that I'm supposed to be doing in the 12th step.

Having had a spiritual awakening, I was awake because I had lost the obsession to drink after I went through those steps. The obsession left me and I don't know when it was. I know it was about 10 to 15 days after I got back from Dallas totally. I wasn't thinking about drinking anymore. I wasn't thinking about anything anymore other than following directions from these men and women.

There's a lineage in Dallas. My home group is a Primary Purpose group in Laguna Niguel. There's a strong lineage that exists in the Primary Purpose group—my sponsor and then his sponsor, Myers, and his sponsor, Cliff, and Cliff to Joe McHugh, and then somewhere right there is Dr. Bob one or two away. These guys are all staying sober and they're happy, joyous, and free.

I wanted that. I didn't want to be obsessed about alcohol anymore. I didn't want to think about alcohol anymore. I want to be free. I want to be happy without alcohol. Can it be possible? And it was.

My business started to fail badly when I got sober, guys. It was just downhill. I'm like, "Okay, I get sober and you punish me." I'm going to lose everything. I was taking new guys into the office and I was shutting my door, getting them out of meetings and shutting my door and going over steps. Boom. 1, 2, 3, 4. Let's go that fast because my sponsor says—I call him up and say, "I got this going. I got that going." He'll say to me, "Did you talk to God about it before you called me?"

I'd lie. "Yeah, yeah, sure did." God didn't tell me anything. What do you got?

"Okay. Next. Here's what I want you to do. Go down to that treatment center. It's about four blocks from your house and find out. Go upstairs and get a newcomer to work with."

I earmarked this page. I carry this book everywhere with me, the basic text. Page 14, bottom paragraph, particularly: "It was imperative to work with others as he had worked with me. Faith without works was dead. He said, and how appallingly true for the alcoholic. For an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others. He could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead."

For me, that means life. The alcohol's gone. I'm not going to survive the ups and downs of life if I'm not working with the other guys. In Dallas, they get to work with women. First of all, in California, my wife wouldn't allow that, and B, it's not customary out here. But I wouldn't be telling the truth if he did not work.

"He would surely drink again. And if he drank, he would surely die." That's me. This is this guy they're talking about in this book. This is me. Then faith would be dead indeed.

With us it's just like that. My book tells me things about must. My book tells me things about rapid. My book tells me that I'm recovered 13 times. It talks about recovering one time in the book. I don't have a drinking problem today. I'm still dealing with the ism. If I didn't have a spiritual awakening and I didn't do this work and I didn't get close to a higher power that I call God, I wouldn't be sober today because I am going through so much crap.

I am telling you that I have a thousand reasons I could drink right now. And I don't have the obsession to. I got the reason, but not the obsession. My dog is dying of cancer. My father just got out of a coma for the second time. My business is failing. We don't know what we're going to do. These are great reasons to drink, aren't they? They're wonderful. I could have gone out on that.

I can't afford resentment, so I can't do the anger drinking and drink at you. This program, the steps, are a miracle that saved my bacon because I finally found after 3,000 meetings that it wasn't the meetings that were going to keep me sober. The fellowship is wonderful. I love you guys. But the book talks about how we trust in infinite God, not finite self. If I'm going to call you up and expect you to keep me sober, that's a tall order to put on you. I don't care if you have 30, 40, 50 years of sobriety because my mental condition is I'm an alcoholic.

Without a spiritual awakening and without working these steps, I'm doomed. It is just bad news for me. Alcohol is killing more people than cancer and AIDS combined every year in the US. We come around these meetings and we try to get the slogans: "Fake it till you make it" and "One day at a time." I can't do it one day at a time for myself. That's just me talking. It's my opinion, my experience.

I'm done. I'm done for good and all. I was done when I got here. I'm done for good and all. I am responsible to keep spiritually fit in order to maintain that doneness. I am responsible to maintain that connection with God. Even if it's just getting on my knees and I don't even know what I'm saying. Yeah, I'll use the third step prayer and I'll get into the book, but sometimes I can get so jammed up that I have no—I can't even recall—

Book page 24 says we can't recall the incomprehensible demoralization of even a week or a month ago, that last bad drunk. The further away I got from the drink in sobriety when I was dry, the closer I got to drinking without the steps. With the steps, I'm about as far away from the drink as I'll ever be. With God, I do not think about alcohol. That is the miracle of the program.

And I'm the real alcoholic. I even look like one with his hat and everything. The miracle for me is the fact that I can come home today and the dog is happy to see me and the kids are happy to see me and my wife is happy to see me, other than storming through the door when I was a drunk. No one wants to be around that and they're scared of dad.

The miracle for me today is the fact that I can get a hold of new guys and get them through the steps rapidly and watch them recover. The first 100 worked these steps in rapid fashion and they didn't even—most of them—they had six of them. Bill failed miserably in his first six months trying to get guys sober. Bob had better successes. This was trial and error. Many people came before us that died from this, whether they died sober or they died drunk.

I keep a list of 31 people in the front of my big book that died from alcoholism that I met in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Most of them went out and drank again. These were people that had been sober either short or long amounts of time, up to 25 years in one case. Without the psychic change, guys, and without the program Alcoholics Anonymous and without the steps and without a higher power, there is no solution.

The book says that we have to live the spiritual life. It's not a theory. I try to do that to the best of my capability every day. Putting God first and foremost in front of me in my morning prayer. I can't wake up very good. I still need four cups of coffee to get going. But if it's just a prayer that says, "God, who can I help today?" Another cup of coffee. Boom. I can get into some real prayer.

Sometimes I don't have enough time to get into that prayer, but I make time. I put everything aside for the guy that needs help. If I get a call, it doesn't matter what time. If I got to run out, I do. I do panels. I've been speaking more and more about this stuff. I don't do a lot of discussion meetings. We do a great big book study in Laguna Niguel. It's out of Dallas. It's the Primary Purpose groups. They've been around what, 22, 23 years now, right?

The bottom line for me is that without that work, I'm done. I'm dead. I'm dead, man. So I will sacrifice anything and everything I can in order to get to carry this message to the alcoholic who still suffers and to those that want to get through the steps and not stay in the meetings, and those that think that they don't have a connection with God can have one or higher power can have one through working the steps.

I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to speak tonight and God bless you.

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